Introduction

This volume brings together different kinds of expertise and disciplinary approaches to human development and well-being, crucial issues in today’s world threatened by such diverse problems as climate change, unequal distribution of wealth and economic exploitation of developing countries, uncontrolled technological progress, systematic violations of human rights, discrimination and racism, health emergencies. The language analysis toolkit ̶ e.g., cross-cultural pragmatics, corpus linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics ̶ has been enriched by the analytical tools and frameworks volunteered by our colleagues specialists in demography, economics, international relations, law and political geography. The analysis of the specialized discourses of well-being and human development has meant to investigate to what extent different communities of practice share approaches and methodologies around these current issues.